Tag Archives: national park week

Cost2Drive 2.0 Helps By Quickly Calculating Fuel Costs

It’s National Park Week here in the US and so we’re spending a good bit of time looking at how people are using our popular trip planning application to plan trips to our national parks. We were thrilled to learn that in the past year alone over 6,500 trips to national parks were planned on Cost2Drive.com, and we expect that number to rise considerably with the launch of our new National Park trip planning pages.

As expected out of the 6,500 trips the most popular parks were Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon with Yosemite placing a distant third.

We did, however, uncover an interesting trend; it appears that national parks go well togetheras nearly 10% of the routes entered started at one national park and ended at another. I guess that’s to be expected with all the bucket-listers out there (I can almost hear Clark Griswold firing up the Wagon Queen Family Truckster), though it may also be due to the remoteness of some of the parks as well as the clustering in some parts of the Western US.

An interesting side note is that the most popular pairing, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, is also the most distant at 873 miles apart (the average distance between the paired parks was 386 miles or 7 hours of travel time).

Clark Griswold’s Wagon Queen Family Truckster from National Lampoon’s Vacation

I thought it would be fun to see what it would cost to drive my ultimate national parks road trip from my home in Washington, DC to Mount Rushmore to Yellowstone to Yosemite to the Grand Canyon and finally back to DC again.

It turns out it will cost $923 in fuel alone for the trip, cover nearly 6,000 milesand take nearly 100 hours of driving time. If you’d like to see the results here’s a link to the route on the upcoming version of Cost2Drive.com, and feel free to try out the site by planning your own ultimate national parks road trip. You can even share the results with friends on Facebook and Twitter.

Note: If you’re driving an RV, motorhome, motorcycle, lawn mower or any other vehicle not currently listed in Cost2Drive you can still use the site by clicking on the ‘can’t find your car’ link and manually entering the fuel information for your vehicle.

We hope everyone takes advantage of the free entrance fees by visiting at least one of our 397 national parks during National Park Week Apr. 21-29.

You can camp wherever you like in Yosemite National Park (though once true, unrestricted camping in Yosemite Valley is no longer allowed due to the damage it causes.)

The National Park Service oversees 397 parks (they oversee 397 units which include 124 historical parks or sites, 75 monuments, 58 national parks, 25 battlefields or military parks, 18 preserves, 18 recreation areas, 10 seashores, four parkways, four lakeshores, and two reserves.

All National Parks have entrance fees (Only 147 charge fees ranging from $5-$25, Great Smoky Mountains National Park is free as is Mt. Rushmore – though there is an $11 parking fee).

You may encounter deadly tarantulas at Zion National Park (although tarantulas do inhabit Zion National Park, they are generally docile and if they do bite their venom is non-toxic to humans).

Glacier National Park is full of glaciers. (it once was, but of the hundreds of glaciers that formed the dramatic landscape of Glacier National Park fewer than 25 active glaciers remain.)

During National Park Week (April 21-29) it’s free to get in all 397 parks (wait…this one is True! But while it’s free to get in all 397 parks, getting to them is another matter, especially with record-high gas prices. That’s why we created our new National Parks trip-planning pages to help park lovers budget for their trip and save money along the way. Check them out to begin planning your next visit to a national park).

Shenandoah National Park is one of nearly 400 parks waiving entrances fees during National Park Week April 21-29

Early Access to Cost2Drive 2.0 for National Park Week

Here at Cost2Go we’ve been working on something for quite some time, something we think is wonderful, and we’re so eager to share it we’re not even going to wait until it’s finished (because nothing on the Web ever is). We’re getting ready to launch an entirely new version of Cost2Drive.com, our popular trip planning application that has now been used by over 1 million people.

But before we do, we’re going to give park lovers a special sneak peak of the new site in honor of National Park Week. We love our national parks, and during National Park Week (April 21-29) something even more wonderful is going to happen as entrance fees to all 397 national parks will be waivedmaking it free to get in. Unfortunately it’s not freeto get tothe parks, and so that’s where we come in by helping people plan their trips with our brand new national park pages.

Yellowstone National Park Page on Cost2Drive 2.0

These beautiful new pages cover the top 10 national parks that users searched for on Cost2Drive over the past 12 months, and they make it super easy to determine how much it will cost to drive to the parks based on the fuel efficiency of your car and current gas prices along your route. They also help you save money by locating the cheapest gas at refueling points along the way (click on the gas pump icon to see the price and location) and by displaying the cheapest airfare so you can see if it’s cheaper to drive or fly to the park.

Results Page for trip to Zion National Park from Sacramento, CA

The new national park pages also display the top hotels, restaurants and attractions in (or near) the parks from TripAdvisor so you can start planning your entire trip directly from these pages, and if your favorite park isn’t among these ten, no problem. You can get all this helpful information for all 379 national parks by simply typing in the park name on the main page of Cost2Drive (note – Mount Rushmore isn’t a National Park, it’s actually a National Memorial) .

Below are links to the 10 brand new national park pages on Cost2Drive so you can plan your trip to the park in earnest and even share your plans with friends via Facebook or Twitter using our new ShareThis widget!

That’s all we’re going to say about Cost2Drive 2.0 for now, but we’ll be sharing much more in the coming weeks as something even more wonderful is coming – Summer – and here at C2G we want to help you make the best of it!